Tag Archives: poems about sexism

As the stories have come out and are coming out about Harvey Weinstein and more and more women are speaking out, I’ve spent a lot of my time feeling sick, with feelings of nerves and anxiety. I haven’t quite been able to work out why – I felt like I was over-identifying with the victims – I’ve never met Harvey Weinstein of course, and I’m unlikely ever to meet him. It’s taken a few days to admit to myself that I’ve met men like him my whole life, have learnt to deal/not deal with them, ignore them, laugh along, keep out of their way, or endured them.

In an article by Stephanie Boland she talks about the concept of the ‘imperfect victim’

I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I was first groped. I only know it was on a minibus and that it was an older boy who rubbed the side of my breast by sticking his arm between my seat and the window. A group of them had teased me the whole journey — it was a camping trip and a long drive — and I’d played along. I’m good at playing along: good at mimicking the register of the banter, always quick with a comeback, able to suss out someone’s personality fast and get their mates laughing. Maybe you are, too. As I got off the bus, our chaperone asked if I was okay and I said yes, carsick, a little, and avoided the boy all weekend.

It was the first of many times I was an imperfect victim.

The concept of the imperfect victim is probably one that many women can identify with. Throughout the course of my PhD, I’ve been looking back and examining my own life for experiences of sexism, but maybe a better way of describing them would be experiences of being the ‘imperfect victim’, and experiences of men who are ‘imperfect perpetrators’. Men who are friends and continue to be so afterwards. Men who are colleagues and continue to be so afterwards. Men who are tutors, but just be sure to avoid them if they’ve had a drink.

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One of the many reasons it can be difficult for women to speak out is our own ideas of what the p perfect victim is (dressed modestly, not drunk, not walking home late at night alone) and how we match up to it, but also of what the ‘perfect’ perpetrator should be like (a stranger, violent, and only extreme assault ‘counting’).

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Over the next couple of days, I’ll be posting some poems around this theme. The following poem is from a sequence I’m working on called ‘All The Men I Never Married’.

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Things I didn’t know before writing this poem:

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1) That something that happened to me when I was 17 had haunted me
2) That something almost happening can stay with you

3) That something happened
4) That my body did not let me down
5) That truth can be broken, and fragmented and this can make it more true
6) That I am both angry/not angry about it

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One of the men in this poem, one of the boys that this poem concerns sent me a Facebook friend request years later. I accepted. The act of doing this stirred up that near miss, that thing that almost but didn’t quite happen. I wrote the poem. Afterwards, I unfriended him without explanation. The act of writing the poem helped me to realise what happened, what didn’t happen.

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The idea of the ‘imperfect victim’ (drunk, at a party, wearing a skirt, going upstairs at a party, being alone, being alone with men, talking to men, being friends with a man) runs through this poem, as do ideas around imperfect perpetrators (a friend, a best friend, just having a laugh, boys will be boys, drunk).

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What happens afterwards? After the near/almost/notquite incident? Or after the poem? What do women carry with them? What did I/do I carry with me? Writing about these incidents might be a way of finding out. This poem is full of air, and space, and silence, and things not said, not thought. What happens to conceptions of assault and what it is when I put a poem around it?

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This poem was published in the most recent issue of The Rialto, along with three more from the sequence ‘All The Men I Never Married’. You can get a copy of the magazine from The Rialto website https://www.therialto.co.uk/pages/

All The Men I Never Married No.19

your dad handing out shots////////////////bright green/////////////////////////liquid sloshing
over the rim//////////////onto my wrist//////////////////////////steam on the windows
of the kitchen////////////////and the living room///////////////////////////////full of bodies////////////////sitting in a circle/////////////////////////////////your mother nowhereget em down/////////////you zulu warrior ////////////////////////////get em downyou zulu chief chief chief///////////////follows me
the singing///////////////the dull thump of a bass////////////////////////////////the staircase bending
and swaying////////////////faraway bathroom///////////////////////////////my hand on the bannister
to keep myself here///////////////inside my body///////////////////////////////inside this house///////////////there’s darkness to my left
there you are///////////////////////////on a bed//////////////in the dark///////////////////////////////rolling a joint////////////////////////////////////////////////hey babe you said
I liked/////////////////////that word on your lips
your friend///////////////at the open window//////////////////////////////letting smoke
slip out into the night////////////////////////////////////////////////////it was good
to sit down////////////////next to you//////////////////////////////////////////////////////my bestfriend
first I was there//////////////////////////////now I’m here
on the bed////////////////on my back//////////////////////////////////a naked woman
blu-tacked and glossy///on the ceiling/////////////////stares down at me from above
and the weight of you/////////////////////////////////on top of me
and at first it’s funny/////////////////as I try to get up
your knees////////////////////////////on my wrists
your hands///////////////////////////on my shoulders
that panic/////////////////////////////in my belly
I’ll remember it///////////////////as long as I live

my knee up into your groin////////you topple/////////////////////like a small tree

and I’m up and out of the room
and into the night
where there are only stars
and the dark asks why////////////////were you there in the dark
and the wind asks what////////////////were you doing upstairs
and the moon asks why////////////////were you wearing that skirt
but my body////////////////my body asks nothing
just whispers/////////////////////////////see
I did not let you down I did not
let you down I did not let you down